This is twelfth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!
Written By: Fsyco
A 2007 article about BioShock saw Clint Hocking coin the term “ludonarrative dissonance” to describe the disconnect in video games between the story being told by the gameplay elements and the story being told by the actual narrative. A commonly-cited example of this phenomenon is Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series. In the narrative, Nathan is a lovable thief with a heart of gold, but in gameplay, he guns down his fellow man without a second thought. It produces an uncanny effect where Nathan comes off like some kind of psychopath, and it feels weird to many players that these two elements never seem to address each other.
Pornographic media has its own version of this, a sort of “pornonarrative dissonance” if you will. Porn media with a plot focus often treat its writing and story as wholly separate elements. The writer comes up with things like plot, characters, and setting, and then comes up with “the sex that will happen” (assuming someone else doesn’t do that). And yet, an often overlooked element is how the narrative should inform the sex scenes, and vice versa.
When these two elements are not in agreement, the project as a whole suffers. It leads to cheesy writing and indistinct characters. It might be serviceable as porn, or the kind of “fine” you italicize or put in air quotes, but it holds the work back as a whole and prevents it from becoming truly special. To illustrate my point, I’d like to look at a few porn video games. Some of them handle this well, and others not so well. By doing so, I’d like to demonstrate how this disconnect manifests in a given work.
Subverse
I’d like to start off by looking at Subverse. In case you’re unfamiliar, Subverse is a big 3D porn space adventure game from StudioFOW. Subverse is about saving the galaxy with your ragtag band of sexy “waifus” from some kind of evil empire that hates sex. It’s Shimoneta by way of Mass Effect. If you haven’t read Bigg’s review of the game, you really ought to. Having played it myself, I broadly agree with him. In summary: it isn’t a very good game.
Now, you may think I’m flogging a dead horse here, but Subverse is actually quite illustrative of the problems I’d like to discuss. Its sex scenes exist almost wholly separately from its narrative. There’s a few sex scenes in the main story, and each of your waifus gets a sex scene at the end of her dedicated side quest, but by and large the game sequesters its sex scenes in an entirely separate mode called PANDORA.
Since the game’s sexual content isn’t really tied to its story, the narrative has to contrive a reason for sex to happen or be involved. There are some stories where sex can happen as a natural plot beat or as the climax of a character’s arc, but your classic “save the kingdom/galaxy/whatever from The Bad Guy” stories that work particularly well in video games don’t lend themselves to this kind of thing. This is a large component of why porn writing often feels so bad; the plot is contrived and actions are driven by “porn logic” that feels disconnected from actual human behavior.
There’s another prominent issue that rears its head, and particularly plagues Subverse. You know about “same face syndrome”, right? Where an artist only has one face they can draw, and all their characters have that same face? The equivalent for a writer is “same voice syndrome”. If you read works by newer, inexperienced writers, you’ll notice that characters will talk and act the same way as each other.
When your sexual content does not integrate well into the rest of your narrative, you run into this problem with a character’s, for lack of better phrasing, “sexual voice”. The characterization in the rest of the narrative in no way informs their bedroom behavior. This is particularly noticeable in Subverse, where characters often talk about engaging in kinky, depraved sex, but their animations in PANDORA are all extremely samey. The animations feel like they were informed more by what references from mainstream porn the animators could find rather than the characters’ personalities.
Funnily enough, our male protagonist, The Captain, is the most notable victim of this disconnect. In conversation with other characters, he makes more than a few references to various depraved sex acts he’s partaken in; during these, he indicates he’s placed in some kind of submissive situation, or that someone has put something in his butt. Neither of those things happens in the sex scenes, though! He’s just a generic stunt dick for the audience to project onto, who would never do anything to threaten their masculinity.
Now that we’ve looked at a bad example, let’s look at a game that handles this better.
Nekopara
Nekopara is a multimedia franchise that primarily consists of erotic visual novels about catgirls. The premise is thus: you are Kashou Minaduki (pronounced Minazuki), son of a prominent Japanese baker, who strikes out on his own to start his own bakery without the help of his parents. He is helped by his catgirls, though, who are like pet cats but they are also women you can fuck (this is played considerably less kinky than you’re imagining). He is also helped by his sister, who is not a catgirl, but he does fuck her after five games.
Nekopara does a much better job at integrating its sex scenes with its narrative, since the story is about the interplay between various characters. It’s ostensibly about Kashou running his own bakery, but the real meat of the series is the relaonships he has with his “catpanions”. The six catgirls each get their own arc (two apiece in the original trilogy), where they each overcome their own various issues and insecurities and grow closer to Kashou as they help him run his bakery, and the sex scenes are a natural emotional payoff for these story arcs. There’s a version of the games without the sex scenes, but I imagine they’d feel incomplete.
Yet, while the sex integrates well into the narrative, it doesn’t quite distinguish the sexual personalities of its cast. When the actual sex starts, they tend to go into that mode you see in Japanese porn, where they get very vocal but also seem frightened and overwhelmed by sex. There is some distinction given, though. The oldest catgirl, Azuki, gets some of the slightly less vanilla kinks (she gets a pee scene, some impregnation roleplay, and gives a footjob at one point), which sort of ties into her characterization as being the one with the most life experience. The rest stick primarily to blowjobs, penis-in-vagina sex, tittyfucks from the ones with big chests, and the occasional bit of lezzing out with the other catgirls. Their kinks also don’t really factor into the story arcs, either. It’s not like we roleplay with Azuki because she wants to be a mother or something.
I think part of this might be that the story isn’t really about sex. Wants and desires don’t really come up much because they don’t have a reason to. Nekopara is mostly about resolving nonsexual interpersonal problems. While the sex is an important story beat, it isn’t what the story revolves around.
You know what games do have stories that revolves around sex, though?
Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story & Hardcoded
Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is an erotic visual novel about sex. It is, specifically, about a down-on-her-luck woman named Jackie who stumbles into the opportunity of a lifetime when an old friend offers her a sugar baby arrangement, and how this arrangement impacts her sex life. Not only do we learn what specific things Jackie is interested in, she also tries new things. This arrangement not only deepens her relationship with her sugar daddy, but with her friends, and with new friends she makes over the game’s runtime.
With the strong character focus, this also means that each character does, in fact, have a distinct sexual personality! I remember what they’re like! Jackie herself starts the game off being a little over-eager but also nervous, which ties in to her characterization as someone who hasn’t been laid in a while. She’s friends with a married couple that does light BDSM for a lawyer-friendly version of OnlyFans, and the sporty tomboy is actually the submissive one to her more femme wife.
The other example I’d like to point to as “one of the good ones” is Hardcoded. Hardcoded is a sort of point and click visual novel set in a post-capitalist cyberpunk world, where you are transfemme android HC. Hardcoded, like Opportunity, has a strong character focus, and the writing and sexual content interplay beautifully to sell that these are real people. My favorite character was Misha, the kinky clerk at the local BDSM shop, and my favorite scene of theirs is when some corporate goon walks into their shop during Free Use Friday. Misha, while bent over their own countertop, seems genuinely pissed and tells the corpo to fuck off.
The thing about both of these games I can’t help but notice is that they’ve got queer casts, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that queerness and quality writing are correlated. It allows their characters to be vulnerable, to communicate with each other, and to explore their wants and desires in a way that naturally integrates with sex. It provides the all-important context that makes the audience care about why these people are fucking.
Subverse and Nekopara, by contrast, draw from more mainstream porn aimed at a “general audience” (read: cishet dudes). This places some strict limits on what you can depict, since you’re targeting a demographic that tends to have easily-upset tummies when it comes to what kind of content they’re willing to stomach. You can’t do anything too weird or out there, and nothing that threatens their masculinity or feels “gay”. Through this lens, it becomes obvious why the sex in big, relatively mainstream projects like Subverse and Nekopara feel so much like it just comes from porn. (As a side note, I once perused the Subverse community page and found quite a few people making a stink about some fairly vanilla futanari content. Like I said, delicate tummies.)
The decision to ape mainstream porn need not even be a conscious one. If you sit down to write “porn”, and your primary reference point for what “porn” is comes from the mostly mainstream content you’ve seen, that’s the first thing you’ll think to do. That’s just how the human brain works; we conceptualize new things in terms of things we’re already familiar with.
In Conclusion
So, how do we fix this? How do we actually improve the writing in our porn?
I think the running theme we’ve looked at here is intentionality. To write porn well, you must write it with purpose. You have to give serious consideration not merely what kind of sexual content you have, but how that sexual content integrates with the story. Who are these characters? Why are they having sex? Would it feel unnatural for the story I have in mind to have sex scenes at all? How is the sex going to inform the dynamics between the characters in both the sex scenes and the non-sexual parts of the story?
My other recommendation would be to look for inspiration for what porn can be outside of the mainstream. There’s nothing wrong with spanking it to the latest Brazzers production, but if that’s the only porn you watch, you’re going to have a limited reference pool to draw on. Try something new! Read something weird on AO3! Play independent porn games! Hell, maybe try some raunchy but not explicitly pornographic books and manga for inspiration. The world is your oyster!
Prior to 2007, ludonarrative dissonance was something not often thought about. While the problem is not entirely solved, some developers began thinking more critically about the interplay of story and gameplay, leading to better games and fewer Nathan Drakes. This is a success that I think can be repeated in porn game development. With some critical thought during the planning stages, you can ensure your next project is a Hardcoded or an Opportunity rather than a Subverse.
Fsyco is a writer and tsuchinoko enthusiast who’s been publishing porn fics since 2021. She is active on Bluesky, and her work can be found on AO3.
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